Living up to the hype created around its latest products, Apple Inc on Tuesday gave its fans not one, but three reasons to smile--iPhone 5C, iPhone 5S and the all-new operating system iOS 7, which will give an entirely new look and feel to the Apple devices.
Apple will offer the iPhone 5C
— a model made of colourful plastic — and the iPhone 5S, which has a faster processor, fancier camera and fingerprint scanner for better security.

The US-based company has not yet declared India plans or pricing for the new phones, but that hasn’t deterred the Indian buyers from speculating and planning for the grand arrival of the devices.

The cheaper--not cheap, only slightly cheaper than the usual price tag of new Apple smartphones--iPhone 5C could help in improving Apple Inc’s mobile phone fold in India, where it has currently less than 4% market share. The iPhone 5S will give direct competition to phones such as HTC One, Nokia Lumia 1020 and Samsung Galaxy S4 once released in the Indian market.

New iPhone 5C will be available in an array of colors, with custom covers to match or mix that display at an iPhone event at Apple's headquarters in Silicon Valley in California. (AFP Photo)

Where the 5S stands out is the storage and processor capacity. With an upper limit of 64 GB, the capacity is almost double the maximum storage capacity of smartphones such as Nokia Lumia 1020, Sony Xperia Z and Moto X. Though Apple's A7 processor is new and is still to go through the litmus test of geeks all around the globe, the 64-bit chip will probably give the phone an edge over the Snapdragons and Qualcomms. The other phones that will feel the heat after the India release are HTC One and Galaxy S4.

Apple also boasts of a better battery life, which will give a tough fight to all the other one-day charge smartphones in the Indian market.

The market also said goodbye to the iPhone 5, with last year’s top-end smartphone set to be discontinued in the wake of the new iPhones. It works like this: the iPhone 5C occupies the slot that would otherwise have been taken by the iPhone 5 after the release of the new phones. And as logic tells you, that would have been plain pointless.

According to a recent research report, Samsung stood on top in the June quarter in the Indian smartphone segment. Micromax held the second spot with a 22% market share. Nokia had a 5% share in the Indian smartphone market in the June quarter after it announced to discontinue its range of Symbian devices.

Although Apple had only a 3.6% market share, it also had the fewest number of phones in the Indian market. With the two new devices raring to take a go at the markets, it is this 3.6%-figure Apple will try to improve.